A sequel to my reply to
@Campbell just upthread:
I find references to
trust or suggestions that sceptics of some or other sort of RPGing are imputing
bad faith play basically unhelpful.
Good faith play of snakes and ladders means not cheating on your dice rolls and being honest in your counting of squares. I played snakes and ladders (in
so many variants - the worst was a Bob the Builder one) with my kids when they were little. But we don't play it any more, because it does not deliver a fun experience. Finding out what happens when you roll a die, and practising your counting, just don't cut it anymore as a leisure activity.
Good faith play of chess means not knocking over the board so that no one can remember the position, and - even if playing other than touch-move - not engaging in so many ums and ahs and takebacks that the game really turns into one person's practice workshop. I don't play much chess, because I don't enjoy it all that much. (And there is a causal interrelationship there to the fact that I'm not that good at it.) Now someone could come along and tell me how great chess is, and how I'd really love it if I just played more of it. And maybe they're right! But maybe they're not. And whether or not they're right, and whether or not I'm going to try and play a bit more chess, has nothing to do with anyone's
good faith. And it's not going to change the fact that I still want to play whist-type auction-and-trick card games.
As Vincent Baker has said, at the core of RPGing is
negotiated imagination. So what is fundamental to any particular approach to RPGing is
who gets to say what, when, in accordance with what rules and principles, and make it part of the shared fiction. One answer to that question is
the GM. But obviously that's not the only possible answer. There are many possibilities, particularly once we think about all the different sorts of things that we might want to say in the course of our RPGing (
what happened before? what happens next? what are things like here-and-now? what will happen if I (as my PC) do this thing rather than that thing? etc).
My enjoyment of a RPG experience, and the particular nature of that enjoyment given the particular nature of the experience, will depend on the answers to those questions about
who gets to say what when. References to
trust and to
good or bad faith do not go even a single step, as far as I can see, to providing those answers.